California schools are sitting on arts funding they’re not using as intended. Eleven percent. That’s the share of schools actually deploying Proposition 28 money the way voters approved it, according to Michelle Castillo, a music teacher at the Los Angeles Unified School District who laid out the problem in a commentary published April 22, 2026, at CalMatters.
That figure isn’t a rounding error. It’s a policy collapse.
Castillo’s argument is direct: California’s school districts have systematically cut Black students, Latino students, immigrant children, and low-income families off from music and arts education, while wealthier communities keep their programs intact. She’s not characterizing this as mismanagement or budget confusion. She names it as a disparity with a pattern.
Proposition 28 passed in 2022 with broad voter support specifically because arts funding in public schools had eroded badly. The measure’s rules weren’t ambiguous. Eighty percent of the money goes toward hiring new arts teachers and launching new programs. The remaining 20% covers supplies. It was structured as supplemental funding, separate from existing commitments, so districts couldn’t simply swap it in to replace money they’d already been spending. Most of them don’t appear to be following either requirement.
The Los Angeles Unified School District is now facing a lawsuit over exactly this issue. Students, parents, and former Superintendent Austin Beutner brought legal action against the district over its handling of Proposition 28 funds. LAUSD moved to dismiss the case. A judge said no.
Castillo draws on a 2021 study conducted for the NAMM Foundation, the charitable arm of the National Association of Music Merchants, to undercut the standard excuse that districts can’t afford proper arts programming. The study found that quality music education in large districts costs roughly $251 per student. Put that against an average per-student district expenditure of $13,214, and you’re looking at about 2% of the budget. “The money isn’t the issue,” Castillo said in her commentary. “It never has been.”
The deeper problem has older roots. The No Child Left Behind Act, signed in 2002, tied federal school funding to standardized test scores in core academic subjects. Districts responded by protecting what was being tested and cutting everything else. Music was among the first to go. What followed is its own kind of irony: English and math scores have declined across the board since that era of cuts, even as the justification for those cuts was always improving academic performance.
The research connecting music education to academic outcomes has been building for decades. Students who receive consistent music instruction score higher on standardized tests, show better attendance, and are less likely to drop out. Studies have also documented measurable improvements in mental health, physical health, and behavior among music students, with effects that don’t disappear when students leave school.
None of it has reversed the trend in Sacramento’s classrooms or in districts across the state.
What Castillo’s piece does well is connect the local and the structural. LAUSD’s legal trouble isn’t just a story about one district mishandling a ballot measure. It’s a data point in a statewide pattern. Eighty-nine percent of California schools either aren’t using Proposition 28 money the right way or aren’t using it at all. That’s not a coincidence. Districts know where to cut, and they know which communities are least positioned to push back.
The 2022 vote was supposed to be a correction. California voters saw what had happened since 2002 and decided to specifically fund arts education as a fix. The measure was written with guardrails because voters, apparently, didn’t trust districts to do it voluntarily. They weren’t wrong to be skeptical. Twenty-two school districts have already been flagged for compliance issues under the measure.
Prop 28 promised arts access to students who’d been shut out of it for a generation. Four years after voters approved it, 11 percent compliance isn’t a slow rollout. It’s a rejection of what voters asked for, and the communities absorbing that rejection are the same ones that’ve absorbed every round of cuts before it.